J.P. Martin

Martin J.P.

Description

The much-loved UNCLE series of children's books by JP Martin, illustrated by Quentin Blake, were fantastical, surreal, funny and heart-warming. Originally told by Martin to his children, they were finally published when he was over eighty years old - and the hilarious array of characters, including the rich but sometimes foolish elephant, Uncle, captured the imagination of children across the world. Fans include Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix, Kate Summerscale, Martin Rowson, Will Self and many more. While exploring the JP Martin archive 50 pages of unpublished Uncle stories were stumbled upon, which are just as hilarious and well-crafted as the published work, and also a fascinating biography of Martin, the missionary turned author, by his daughter, which explores the unique imagination and experiences that informed this remarkable and inventive genius. These have never been seen before and hopefully these can be shared with Uncle's legions of fans and introduce JP Martin and Uncle to more fans as well.

Sujets

• Children's

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788031066
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

J.P.Martin
Father of Uncle
A Master in the
Great English Nonsense Tradition
1879–1966

Quentin Blake’s illustrations throughout all six Uncle books capture the mood and spirit of J.P.Martin’s stories. Uncle’s close helpers, The Old Monkey, The Cat Goodman, and Lucy the Parrot, decorate the Christmas tree.
( Battle for Badgertown page 143 The Complete Uncle page 715)
J.P.Martin’s Uncle Books Uncle Jonathan Cape 1964 New York Review of Books 2007 Puffin 2017 Uncle Cleans Up Jonathan Cape 1965 New York Review of Books 2008 Uncle & his Detective Jonathan Cape 1966 Uncle & the Treacle Trouble Jonathan Cape 1967 Uncle & Claudius the Camel Jonathan Cape 1969 Uncle & the Battle for Badgertown Jonathan Cape 1973 The Complete Uncle edited by Marcus Gipps Matador 2013
All volumes and editions illustrated by Quentin Blake

Quentin Blake’s endpapers of Uncle’s Castle of Homeward.
( The Complete Uncle page xxii)
J.P.Martin
Father of Uncle
A Master in the
Great English Nonsense Tradition
1879–1966
Stella Martin Currey
Edited by James Martin Currey
© James Martin Currey 2017
Uncle text copyright © J.P.Martin 1964; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1964
Uncle Cleans Up text copyright © J.P.Martin 1965; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1965
Uncle and His Detective text copyright © J.P.Martin 1966; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1966
Uncle and the Treacle Trouble text copyright © J.P.Martin 1967; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1967
Uncle and Claudius the Camel text copyright © J.P.Martin 1969; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1969
Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown text copyright © J.P.Martin 1973; Illustrations © Quentin Blake 1973
All Uncle books first published by Jonathan Cape, now an imprint of
Random House Children’s Publishers UK
Quotations from these six books are used with permission from Random House Group Ltd.
Illustrations are used with the permission of the Quentin Blake archive All rights reserved.
The right of J.P.Martin to be identified as the author and of Quentin Blake to be identified as the illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This collection first published in Great Britain in 2016 by Matador.
ISBN 978 1 788 031 066
Typeset by Kate Kirkwood
[e-mail]
Management of design and cover by
James Currey & Glenda Pattenden
Most of the line illustrations have been scanned by Marcus Gipps from Quentin Blake originals, but the files for Uncle and His Detective and Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown are missing from the archive, and have been scanned from first-printing books.
Matador
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Kibworth Beauchamp
Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Family Tree
Map 1 England: Places with which J.P.Martin was associated
Map 2 South Africa: Pilgrim’s Rest, Roodepoort & Mafeking 1904-13
Map 3 Palestine & Egypt 1918-19
1 Introduction A Master in the Great English Nonsense Tradition
2 Cannibals & Crookballs 1841-79
3 Trapping the Half-timers 1879-96
4 More Frivolous Letters I Fear You Could Not Find 1896-8
5 The Firm Shore of Recollection
6 Eyes of a Luminous Brown 1898-1904
7 Gold Miners at Pilgrim’s Rest 1904-7
8 The Merry Wives of Mafeking 1907-13
9 Drives with the Respectable Horses 1913-16
10 It May Make You More Practical 1916 -18
11 Jerusalem, Magnificent yet Mean 1918
12 The Camels are Coming! 1918
13 Elephantine Ideas in Egypt 1919
14 Traction Engines Goin’ Up Camborne Hill 1919-21
15 Those Queer-Tempered Angels, the Earth & Sky 1922
16 The Super-Subtle Venetian 1922-9
17 Lady Lionease, Sunset Beach & Comfort Cove 1929-31
18 We Are Becoming Quite a Literary Family 1931-6
19 King of the Badgers & Badgertown 1936-40
20 Daventry Calling & Brass Barking 1940-4
21 Bomb Disposal as a Game of Chess 1944-7
22 A Dance of Joy on a Lonely Road 1948-60
23 The Lover of Paradox 1958-66
24 Uncle: Fantasy within a Framework of Reality 1963-6
25 Uncle: Three More Pots of Honey 1966-73
Appendix Unpublished Uncle Stories
Index
All six Uncle books build up to a great battle between Uncle’s followers from the Castle of Homeward and the Beaver Hateman lot from Badfort. This archetypal battle was drawn in 1967 by Quentin Blake especially for Stella Martin Currey and R.N.Currey, who encouraged J.P.Martin to write down his stories in 1934 and who then persevered for 30 years before they got Jonathan Cape to publish them from 1964 onwards.
( The Complete Uncle page 762)
To Quentin Blake
Who enhanced
J.P.Martin’s originality
& to Clare Currey
15 November 1936 – 26 April 2016
In memory
of all the publishing
achieved together
Preface
There is an underground army of enthusiasts who think that they personally have discovered the secret treasure of the Uncle books for the first time. Uncle was on the front cover of the Christmas Economist 2005 with a three page article asking ‘Whatever happened to Uncle?’ Things started to happen.
The New York Review of Books Children’s Collection published Uncle in 2007 and followed it with Uncle Cleans Up in 2009. It appears in Puffin in 2017. Steady sales show that new generations are responding with fresh delight half a century after the original publication.
The publisher Marcus Gipps was fast onto Kickstarter crowd-funding in March 2013 and found that over 700 members of this underground army were willing to pre-order copies of The Complete Uncle , which would republish the last three books for the first time. He went on to secure substantial orders from the book trade. He invited distinguished journalists and writers to give accounts of how as children they first discovered the elephant Uncle in his purple dressing-gown riding on a traction engine.
How did such crazily inventive ideas spring from J.P.Martin’s imagination? What events in an interesting and varied life sustained this feat of storytelling? He had always written adult novels in the hope of making some money to add to his minimal stipend as a Methodist minister. All his manuscripts were declined. All around him books from his family were getting published. In 1934 his daughter Stella Martin Currey, novelist, and her husband R.N.Currey, poet, encouraged him to write down the Uncle stories which he had been telling his family and friends since the time of the First World War.
For thirty years Stella and Ralph Currey resolutely kept trying to get Uncle accepted. But publishers were only interested in ‘juvenile fiction’ for their ‘rewards lists’ as prizes in schools and Sunday schools throughout the Empire. Uncle’s knockabout battles with the Bads were not considered suitable for children. The children would have loved them but they were not asked. At last in 1964 Jonathan Cape launched Uncle to superb reviews in the satire-rich sixties.
In writing this biography in 1984 Stella Martin Currey was able to make use of J.P.Martin’s archive. He was always writing, always recording. He kept a journal and saved family letters. His Palestine Journal of 1918 charts the day-to-day happenings as the Ottoman Empire suddenly collapses. The monuments he saw on his trip up the Nile fed through into the elephantine excitements of Uncle’s castle. His missionary aunt and uncle had saved others and themselves from the cooking pots of the cannibal king of Fiji. His mother’s letters to her daughter in France have an unexpected frivolity for a parson’s wife. His wife Nancy emerges with power from his pages.
The original title Uncle was my Father reveals how Stella Martin Currey’s script was a family memoir. It was decided that it needed to be a biography. Stella Martin Currey quotes the lively memories of her sister Grace and her brothers John and Hal. Her own vivid reminiscences are now presented inside quotation marks in equal standing with those of her siblings.
An impersonal narrative has been adopted which integrates James Martin Currey’s additions into Stella Martin Currey’s original text. Quotations from J.P.Martin’s journals and letters have been gathered under topics reflecting his delight in the strange ways of his fellow humans which he transferred onto animals in the Uncle books.
Clare and James Martin Currey felt it necessary to place J.P. and Nancy Martin’s lives in a firmer historical context. They were of that doomed generation who first suffered war on an industrial scale in the so-called Great War. They worked among people made destitute in the inter-war depression. Then they found that their own children had grown to an age to have to fight in the Second World War. Then came the Cold War which, in the fifties and sixties, all too nearly became hot. So this book provides an insight into the social realities of the first half of the twentieth century.
The list of Kickstarter supporters at the back of the book proves that for a start a biography of J.P.Martin will be of interest to the underground army of enthusiasts.
Acknowledgements
The first acknowledgement must be to J.P. and Nancy Martin’s four children Stella, Grace, John and Hal. His sister Dora Fowler Martin, herself a novelist, also provided vivid written memories of her mischievous brother who told her serial stories on the long walks to chapel. His grandson Andrew’s contributions are revealing and it is sad that he did not live to read the manuscript of this represented book.
Marcus Gipps has supported this publication of the biography from the first. His publishing skills and ready advice have been valuable at every stage. His enthusiasm has been a great encouragement. The support he conjured up for The Complete Uncle with his inspired use of Kickstar